Review Mastering Oracle SQL 2nd Edition

Mastering Oracle SQL 2nd Edition by Sanjay Mishra and Alan Beaulieu

The goal of the authors is to explain how to write good readable SQL queries in Oracle 10g. The book starts with how to construct SELECT statements to group, filter and format result sets for dates, reports and data analysis. Then it proceeds to cover Oracle-specific queries and functions for hierarchies (data in tree structures), object-oriented types, XML documents, regular expressions and models (spreadsheet-like objects). Where relevant, there are notes about the differences between SQL for Oracle 10, Oracle 9 and the ANSI standard.

As expected from the title, the chapters using declarative programming (i.e. SQL queries) for relational data, hierarchical data and reports are the most comprehensive. Chapters on interfacing Oracle SQL with other technologies such as scripting (Oracle's PL/SQL), object-oriented types, XML and regular expressions, or on optimization, are brief but sufficient to get you started, especially if you have a existing background in those technologies.

This is the 2nd edition, so it's not surprising that the scope of the book is well-defined and that the writing is easy to read and polished. The example data and queries are just complex enough to demonstrate the issues without obscuring the main points. Minor annoyance about Chapter 15, "SQL Best Practices", which does not explain how to use the query analyzer and bind variables.

I was already familiar with basic Oracle SQL but didn't really understand the language; this book blew away many of the fuzzy concepts in my mind and provided me the framework to tackle more complex problems.

Review: Spiderman 2 (2004)

Poor Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire)! As if being an unappreciated superhero in New York isn't enough, he's too skint to pay his rent, his life long sweetheart MJ (Kirsten Dunst) is betrothed to a national hero, Aunt May's (Rosemary Harris) house is about to be repossessed by the bank and his best friend Norman (James Franco) is consumed with hatred of Spiderman who killed his dad. What's more, there's a new super villain Dr Ock (Alfred Molina) on the loose. Maybe this superhero lark isn't all it's cracked up to be and it's time to grow up. Or maybe being a hero means more than just rounding up baddies, leaping between buildings and wearing a cool costume?

This second installment of Spiderman's adventures is unusually sophisticated for the costume superhero genre. Writer Alvin Sargent assails our hero with numerous mundane and profound problems, and reflects his situation in the subplots. He's also been allowed to move the story along a couple of years and to avoid revisiting ground covered in the first film. A little extra care with the science would have helped avoid some annoying statements (for example, Dr Ock's fusion device generates one thousand megawatts of power without immediately incinerating everyone in the room).

Director Sam Raimi keeps a tight grip on the story and the tone light. He pokes gentle fun at the essential silliness of the genre (the lift scene is hilarious) and doesn't let the special effects overwhelm the most down to earth superhero in the world.

The cast look as if the characters in the comics have come to life, especially the editor of the Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson (J. K. Simmons) with his flat top haircut and overbearing behaviour. The leads, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, are starting to look a bit too old as college kids in their first jobs. There's a cameo appearance of Sam Raimi's buddy Bruce Campbell as the snooty theatre door attendant.

A satisfying continuation of Spiderman's story.

Stars: 3 out of 5

Review: Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow (2004)

In the 1930s, intrepid reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her former boyfriend Joe "Sky Captain" Sullivan (Jude Law) race around the world to foil the evil plans of Dr Totenkopf. They have to battle Totenkopf's robots and henchmen, and rescue Sky's gadgeteer mate Dex (Giovanni Ribisi) and a bunch of kidnapped scientists. On their mission, they get meet of some of Sullivan's old friends Kaji (Omid Djalili) and Franky (Angelina Jolie).

After a spectacular start with its impressive backlit cinematography and computer generated visuals inspired by "Metropolis", this film runs of out steam after Polly meets Sky Captain (which is pretty darn early) and crawls from action scene to action scene. The rudimentary adventure plot quickly disintegrates from too many holes, omissions and convenient escapes. For example, the journey to Nepal serves absolutely no purpose other than to provide some background on Totenkopf.

Jude Law is an appropriately square-jawed hero, Angelina Jolie provides a surprisingly plummy British accent, but Gwyneth Paltrow lacks the spark to be an enterprising journalist and looks too modern. Michael Gambon as Polly's editor vanishes after stating some obligatory concerns for his reporter's safety. Sir Laurence Olivier makes a short digitized appearance as Dr Totenkopf.

Special effects needing a plot.

Stars: 1 out of 5

Review: Philosophy Of Science: A Very Short Introduction (2002)

Title	Philosophy Of Science: A Very Short Introduction
Author	Samir Okasha
Year	2002
ISBN	0-19-280283-6
Stars	3/5

Reasonable Overview For The Interested

What do philosophers think about science? This book provides a brief history of the philosophy of science, describes some logical assumptions in the practice of science and problems in science, and discusses Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolutions. The book concludes with a discussion on science and society.

Philosophy of science, as described in this book, seems to have become a rather esoteric subject removed the daily practice of scientists and the everyday use of science. Some questions that spring to mind but which are not covered in this book: Does the publication and independent verification of results lead to the self-correcting nature of science? Why is the simplest explanation the best? How can scientists who cannot easily perform experiments, such as astronomers and sociologists, make verifiable theories?

Chapter 6 presents three problems in science: Newton's view of absolute space, the classification (by feature or by genetics) of living creatures and the whether the mind is modular or not. It's not clear to me how the philosophy of science can help in resolving these problems. Newton's view was probably driven by his desire to prove the literal truth of the Bible. In this day and age of automated indexing systems, does it really matter which method is used to classify creatures? Finally, shouldn't scientists collect more data before deciding if the mind is modular or not?

This book covers a number of topics in the field but fortunately doesn't get bogged down in a deep technical discussion on any single topic. It is a reasonable overview of the topic for the interested reader and one of the better books in the "Very Short Introduction" series.

Review: Birthday Girl (2001)

John Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), a lonely and frustrated bachelor, marries a Russian mail-order bride, Nadia (Nicole Kidman). After an initial period of awkwardness (they don't speak each other's language), they settle down to a life of kinky sex. Their marital bliss is upset by the arrival of Nadia's friends, the genial Yuri (Mathieu Kassovitz) and the menacing Alexei (Vincent Cassell).

The premise makes no sense: Why doesn't Nadia speak English? How do Nadia's friends know John's responsibilities in his job? After the interesting start exploring the theme of trust, the second half of the film becomes conveniently plot driven and predictable. As expected, the stars do a fine job in their constrained roles with French actor Vincent Cassell having the strongest presence as the violent yet tender ex-lover.

Stars: 1 out of 5

Review: The Ipcress File (1965)

When a top government physicist goes missing and his minder is found murdered, the British secret service decides to investigate. Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is transferred to the team looking for the physicist. During the investigation, he discovers something more sinister called Ipcress.

This low-key thriller has all the elements of the "realistic" spy genre: mysterious shadowy men, treachery, seduction, and a bit of action. Sometimes, it feels like it tries to be too realistic when the agents also have to do boring surveillance tasks, fill in forms and survive departmental politics.

Michael Caine is perfect as the bespectacled gourmet Harry Palmer, playing him with the right amount of cheek, charm and ruthlessness expected of a public service secret agent. A youngish Gordon Jackson co-stars as Palmer's partner, Jock, with that very recognisable Scottish accent.

Very dated but watchable.

Stars: 3 out of 5

Review: Avalon (2001)

Simon wondered what I thought of Avalon, and I sent him a quick reply. Here's a longer review with possible spoilers. Caveat: I watched Avalon on late night telly, so it might have been a less than engrossing experience compared to watching it in the cinema.

In a dreary and depressed city, people play a virtual combat game called Avalon to earn a living. One of the aces is Ash (Malgorzata Foremniak), a loner who lives with her Bassett hound (a recurring mark in director Oshii's films) in an small flat full of books. She finds out about an extra level in Avalon that can only be entered by defeating the Ghost. Initially reluctant, she joins an old team mate, Stunner (Bartlomiej Swiderski) and a mysterious Bishop (Dariusz Biskupski), in finding this Ghost.

Avalon is fairly dull and plodding. Director Mamuro Oshii overuses repetition in the first half of the film to suggest that Ash's world may be just a simulation. The central plot element of the film, the Avalon combat game, is devoid of tension and linear (defeat the grunts, then beat the boss). In the game, none of the actors look or move like players in fear of their (virtual) lives. The only standouts are the production design of the bleak city and cinematography.

0.5 out of 5 stars.

Review: HarperCollins Concise Handbook for Writers

I was never terribly happy with my writing, so I sought to improve it. One of the books I recently read was the HarperCollins Concise Handbook for Writers:

Title: HarperCollins Concise Handbook for Writers
Authors: Peter Dow Adams and Amy Tickle
Year: 1994
ISBN: 0-06-501994-6

Stars: 4/5

This is a textbook on writing papers for American college students. It provides advice on: how to research, plan and structure one's work, the appropriate style for papers, constructing paragraphs and sentences, the use and misuse of common words, and grammar, spelling and punctuation.

The lessons are written in a direct and authoritative style, and worked examples are provided. The explanations are enhanced by the use of proofreading marks and diagrams.

In addition to the usual table of contents, glossaries and index, every entry in the table of contents shows both the topic and an example, each page has a tab at the edge with an abbreviation of the page's topic, each tab is aligned with the abbreviated table of contents and there are many tables that summarize different categories of words. These devices make the book easy to use as a reference.

I have only used this book for a short time but it has already helped me write more confidently and smoothly.

Review: How to Begin Studying English Literature (1987)

English Lit. has always been a mystery to me; I'd never quite figured out what to discuss after reading a novel or poem. I'd make a reasonable guess in an exam, write some answer and seem to do well enough. But I felt that had to be a systematic way to study literature, just like mathematics or science. This high school guide, How to Begin Studying English Literature, gave me a fair idea how to start:

(This review is for the 1987 edition.)

This guide provides basic study techniques for students of English in the UK. The first part covers analysis; how to find themes in a work, how characters support a theme, the general structure of a story, the use of style and imagery, and how to study irony. The second part describes how to compose and write essays during an English examination.

The language in the book is kept simple and there is hardly any jargon. In each chapter, a method for studying each topic is first described and then a worked example is demonstrated. No particular interpretation is pushed and the student is encouraged to read works and come to their own conclusions. All the techniques are then brought together in the chapters on essay writing.

Although aimed at students, this guide would help anyone who is interested in gaining a better understanding of literature.

Review: Pandora's Star

Woo-hoo! My first fiction review for Amazon:

Hundreds of years in the future, fusion power and wormhole technology has enabled mankind to colonize hundreds of worlds in the galaxy. Rejuvenation therapy, cloning and memory copying allow anyone with enough money to live indefinitely. Life's pretty idyllic for citizens; there's plenty of space to live in, mankind has met no hostile aliens and the Commonwealth government is fairly benign. Naturally, this utopia is threatened by forces within and without.

The first hundred-odd pages set the stage and are a bit tedious. There's plenty of characters and each one gets a certain number of pages. Unfortunately, their stories are told with the same style so it's hard to be really interested in them. Once the Commonwealth decides to explore a stellar anomaly, the characters become better defined, the plot picks up pace and the story races to multiple cliffhangers.

Hamilton's great at writing action and creating detailed universes, but his writing can be boring elsewhere. For instance, it was a chore to read the horse-trading between senators for the presidency in the Commonwealth and his characters seem to only experience intimacy by having sex (and plenty of it). Minor niggles aside, this is a very enjoyable space adventure and I look forward to the sequel.

Review: Linguistics A Very Short Introduction

I was hoping to find out more about linguistics but this book wasn't much help. Here's the review I wrote for Amazon:

This book starts interestingly with the question of the meaning of words, how we encode sounds with symbols and how languages change over space and time. Unfortunately, from Chapter 4 onwards, the discussion becomes quite hard to follow because it relies on many linguistic terms and complex sentences. For example, I had to re-read this sentence in page 65 several times to understand it:

"This ['distributive' element] distinguishes a set whose members are in some way differentiated; so, for example, forms that might be glossed as 'flower-DIST' could be used of flowers that, as well as being two or more, are not all of the same sort."

The editing and formatting of the book could be better. Some linguistic terms (e.g. "gloss" in page 50 and "genitive" in page 110) are first introduced in an example rather than in the main text. Sometimes examples, captions and quotes are in boxes in a bold font (e.g. in pages 93, 94 and 95) but other times are formatted as a standalone paragraph (e.g. in pages 77, 78 and 79). Poor formatting has resulted in a photograph of Chomsky and some text in page 90, then a description of his ideas in a box starting in page 91 but with the final sentence in a box appearing in page 92.

Many pages in this short (152 page) book are wasted: four pages are allocated to photographs of linguists and eight pages are used to advertise other books in the series! I would have preferred to see some of these pages used for a glossary of terms.

Review: Learn German The Fast and Fun Way

I'm pretty leery of any book that claims to teach something the "fast and fun way" and unfortunately my suspicions have been proved right again.

Review: Language - The Basics

It's been a busy Melbourne Cup long weekend; here's another book review.

Reviews: Teach Yourself German and Collins Gem English Grammar

Tis the Melbourne Cup long weekend, so here's a couple more mini-reviews: Teach Yourself German and English Grammar (Collins Gem Series).

Review: Complete Guide to Learning a Language

Skimmed this book to see if there were better ways to learn another language other than listen, read, practice and analyze. As I wrote in my review, I wasn't impressed.